Quotes About Slavery

Moor Green plantation was owned by the extremely cruel Redman Foster. Foster is said to have killed one of his bastard babies by a slave mistress because it was deformed. The outright murder of a slave was illegal, but prosecution of a slave owner would have been difficult.

Lee had a low opinion of black abilities, and thought that Virginia would be better off it its freed black population now migrated south into the Cotton States. On the other hand, four years before the war he had written, "Slavery as an institution, is a moral and political evil in any country," and in a postwar conversation he was to say, "I am rejoiced that slavery is abolished.

Animals, whom we have made our slaves, we do not like to consider our equal.

Repression is the only lasting philosophy. The dark deference of fear and slavery, my friend," observed the Marquis, "will keep the dogs obedient to the whip,

La represión es la única filosofía de efectos duraderos. La gran deferencia del miedo y de la esclavitud, amigo —dijo el marqués,— conservará a los perros obedientes al látigo mientras este techo —añadió mirando al techo— nos proteja del cielo.

The Northern onslaught upon slavery was no more than a piece of specious humbug designed to conceal it's desire for economic control of the Southern states.

Because this woman sobbed in the way that all women sob, whether they do it outwardly or whether they keep it silently locked up inside themselves. They sob because they realise, one day, that they were born on a planet of men, and that short of death or spinsterhood they can never escape. Effie's Aunt Rachel used to say, 'Even the slaves could run away, but where can women go?

It might seem an abstraction to say that the Age of Liberty was also the Age of Slavery. But consider these figures: of the known 10,148,288 Africans put on slave ships bound for the Americas between 1514 and 1866 (of a total historians estimate to be at least 12,500,000), more than half, 5,131,385, were embarked after July 4, 1776.

The slave-holders of the South," Adams wrote in his diary, "have bought the cooperation of the Western country by the bribe of the Western Lands."3 Now, he warned, a fight with Mexico over Texas would deepen the nation's habituation to racist wars, leading to the point where racism and war would be the only thing that gave the republic meaning.

La raza y la esclavitud de nuestras necesidades cotidianas son las misteriosas causas maestras que gobiernan nuestro destino.

Looked at from the vantage points offered by fictional stories, slavery, like the glass viewed from above, at first glance, can appear to be merely trivial, two-dimensional, erotic behavior that is not deserving of any serious attention.

At the supreme moment of victory they cheered their Father Abraham, the man who, after a shaky start in office, learned how to command armies, grew in vision and eloquence, brought down slavery, and who, just six weeks ago, had given the most graceful and emotionally stunning inaugural address in the history of the American presidency.

Not only did Confederate soldiers fight better; they also fought for a noble cause, the cause of state's rights, constitutional liberty, and consent of the governed. Slavery had nothing to do with it.

Dred Scott decision that legalized slavery in all territories;

Davis and Stephens hewed to the same line: Southern states seceded not to protect slavery but to vindicate state sovereignty.

Beard's view, slavery and emancipation were almost incidental to the real causes and consequences of the war. The sectional conflict arose from the contending economic interests of plantation agriculture and industrializing capitalism.

sees the revolutionary dimension of the war not simply as a triumph of freedom over slavery, or industrialism over agriculture, or the bourgeoisie over the plantation gentry—but as a combination of all these things. Plantation agriculture in the South was not a form of feudalism, Moore insists; rather, it was a special form of capitalism that spawned a value system and an ideology that glorified hereditary privilege, racial caste, and slavery while it rejected bourgeois

slave system presented no obstacle to the growth of industrial capitalism as an economic system

conception of democracy that includes the goals of human equality, even the limited form of equality of opportunity, and human freedom. … Labor-repressive agricultural systems, and plantation slavery in particular, are political obstacles to a particular kind of capitalism, at a specific historical stage: competitive democratic capitalism we must call it for lack of a more precise term.

the slaves in the seven cotton states of the lower South had received in the form of food, clothing, and shelter only 22 percent of the income produced by the plantations and farms on which they worked.

The principal form of property in the South was, of course, slave property. Southern states had seceded because they feared that the Lincoln administration would interfere with the institution—despite the president's repeated assertions, well into the war, that he had neither the intention nor the power to do so.

The South was rebelling "not in the interest of general humanity, but of a domestic despotism. … Their motto is not liberty, but slavery.

Some employers banned drinking on the job and tried even to forbid their workers to drink off the job. For men who considered their thrice-daily tipple a right, this was another mark of slavery.

American whites somehow were able collectively to love liberty, recognize the evils of slavery, and tolerate slavery, all at the same